Jill Marie Snyder had occasionally heard her mother refer to the love letters she and her future husband had exchanged during their courtship but, as a distracted daughter with her own life, she had all but forgotten about them.

Then one day in 2007, shortly after her mother, Mary Brooks Snyder, had died, Snyder was cleaning out her mom’s bedroom when she opened a cabinet by the bed and found a plastic bag containing a series of carefully arranged correspondence from 1937 to 1940.

“Oh! Wow! The letters!” Snyder said to herself.

But rather than read any of them, she put them on a shelf. And there they sat, unread, for two more years.

When I spoke with Snyder last Wednesday morning in her Hamden home, I asked her why she had waited so long to read through them. “I thought they would be too private,” she said. “I felt it would be an intrusion for me to read them.”

But she said it slowly dawned on her that she was responsible for those letters, that she was their “steward.” She also recalled her mother had once said she would like it if they could somehow be published.

And so finally she pulled them out and began to read. “Once I read the first few, I was hooked.”

She called up her only surviving sibling, her brother, Roy Snyder, who lives in Florida, and read some excerpts to him.

“We were amazed,” she recalled. “They were so expressive, so well-written. The idea began to grow that they should be put in a book.”

After five years of research into her family’s history and what was happening in America while those letters were being written, Snyder self-published “Dear Mary, Dear Luther: A Courtship in Letters” (AuthorHouse).

The book is a vivid reminder of a time before emails and texting, when people regularly kept in touch with one another by writing letters. Mary Brooks and her boyfriend, Luther Snyder, rarely even got a chance to talk on the telephone.

It’s clear, as they wrote back and forth, how much those letters meant to both of them; during those years he was living and working in New York City (as a hotel porter) and she was in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where both of them had grown up.

On Oct. 6, 1939, she wrote: “It was a pleasure to hear from you. I always look forward to receiving your letters. They are the sunshine of my life.”

His response, written four days later from the Hotel Wellington in Manhattan: “So much pleasure is absorbed by your letters. Please continue to send them.”

On Nov. 29 of that same year, he wrote: “I’ve read your letter over repeatedly until I’ve learned it by heart. It helps so much.”

Over the years, their love blossomed, and the letters reflect that mounting devotion. On March 28, 1939, she wrote: “I think of you at least a thousand times a day, maybe even more than that.” Three days later he replied: “It’s just wonderful to hear that you think of me so often, we seem to resemble each other in that matter. Please continue to do so and maybe we will be rewarded by seeing each other.”

On Nov. 5, 1939, he wrote at the end of his letter: “Well, my heart is still beating for you and I hope it is the same by you.” Seven days later, she answered at the end of her letter: “Please take it easy, and keep your heart beating for me.”

By the spring of 1939 he had begun writing romantic four-line poems within his letters. From July 15, 1939: “Deep through the night / And during the sultry day / Would be a delight / To be near her and not away.”

Snyder said one of her favorite letters written by her father was composed on Nov. 25, 1940. In it he admitted he used to “scoff” at the word “love” and “the idea of marriage.” But he said “the first sight of you” changed his outlook.

Then he wrote: “And now I can’t conceive anything but planning my life for you and with you. Since meeting I have derived so much pleasure at the sight of you, in your walk, in your talk, in your dress, the thrill of holding your hand and your caresses and your whole being in general. I even tingle at the mention of them.”

For his daughter, reading this was a revelation. “My father died when I was 19. I recall him as a very quiet man around the house. He was a humble man. But his letters are very expressive and descriptive. They show a lot of wisdom.”

Snyder wrote in her book’s preface: “The media often portray African American males as brutes, lacking feelings and deep emotions.” That’s one of the reasons she wanted to share her dad’s letters with the world.

Snyder noted during our talk that what emerges in his letters is “a loving black man. He views her with tenderness and kindness. That’s rarely portrayed (in American culture). When you see African American couples on TV, it’s a ‘sit-com.’”

Although she remembers her father as a well-read man who loved to quote Shakespeare and French phrases, Snyder said the racism of that period made it impossible for him, as well as his wife, to fulfill their career potential. He spent years working as a hotel porter before moving to New Haven in June 1941 (five months after marrying Mary) to take a job as a factory worker at Winchester Repeating Arms. America was gearing up for World War II and hundreds of African Americans were coming to New Haven to work at Winchester.

Because Snyder’s first son was born five days before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Snyder was 30 years old and worked at a factory supporting the war effort, he was not called to serve in World War II.

After the war ended, he was laid off from his Winchester job. He bought a truck and tried to make a living by hauling furniture and trash around New Haven, but it didn’t result in a decent income. For a while he worked at Schiffrin’s Market on Dixwell Avenue and became a custodian at Yale. His daughter said he needed Yale’s benefits because his wife had health issues and large medical bills. He worked his way up to a foreman’s job at Yale.

“I think he would have been a great teacher,” Snyder said, but African Americans generally were not able to get teaching jobs at that time.

As for her mother, Snyder said she was a naturally gifted painter; her artwork hangs in Snyder’s home. After she raised her kids, Mary Snyder worked for an insurance company, then at Yale as a nuclear research assistant.

The main reason she needed to work was that her husband died in 1973 after a long battle with prostate cancer.

“His whole world was his marriage and his kids,” Snyder said of her dad. “He’s representative of millions of black men who want to do the right thing and love their families.”

In her book, Snyder wrote: “My father loved my mother to his last breath. Near the end, he tenderly held my mother’s hand in his and whispered, ‘Mary, you have been a blessing and a joy to me.’”

Snyder, who is single and has no children, believes it was important to preserve those letters and share them in a book. “I didn’t want them to just be thrown away one day. I thought, ‘Let’s share them with the world.’”

She said other African Americans often tell her they have family letters, diaries and photos in their homes. “I’m on a mission now to encourage people to do something with that material. Put it on Facebook, create a website. It’s important for African American families to tell our stories: the lives of ordinary families and how we were able to survive through a lot of difficult times. This can be inspirational.”